- It's the old chicken-or-egg problem: Nobody's going to spend money to upgrade to an aftermarket HD Radio purchase unless there's great programming on the HD2 channels, and broadcasters can't reasonably afford to spend big money on HD2 programming if there's no audience.
- Long-term, there's a second chicken-or-egg problem: Going digital-only sometime down the road would be cool, as all of a sudden each market would have DOZENS of stations on FM dial (up to 8 times as many as now)... but you wouldn't want to do that until there were so many HD Radio receivers out there that you could afford to pre-HD radio obsolete. But there's no way to get that many HD Radio receivers out there unless...
- It's 1985 technology:
- Wrong interface decision:
And here are some options:
(1) Forget the secondary channels. Use the digital bandwidth to broadcast your FM signal in 5.1-channel surround-sound.
(2) Take the secondary stations out of hiding -- change the tuner interface to replace names like "FM 92.3-HD2" (and the need to click through -HD1 to get to them) with alphabetical channel names (Adult Standards, Bluegrass, Country Heritage...) or at least channel numbers (1-800 would allow for 8 channels for each of the 100 or so possible FM frequencies, although lots of them would be empty in any given market, which is why I prefer alphabetical).
(3) As an optional follow-up to step (2), divvy up the rights (i.e., use the HD Radio Alliance to do a whole bunch of cross-LMAs) so that Clear Channel has rights to program and sell all of the secondary channels in NYC, CBS Radio has the rights in L.A., Emmis has the rights in Chicago, etc.
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